Personal Blogs

'They are us': some responses from social psychologists

In this week's blog, Stephanie Taylor discusses some social
psychological responses to the terrorist attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Nine weeks after they occurred, the
terrorist attacks on mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand receive little media
attention. There is still horror about what happened, but it is now combined
with people's responses to subsequent awful events, including the April attacks
in Sri Lanka. However, the Christchurch attacks continue to be discussed on
academic sites, including in psychology publications. This week's blog will
focus on some social psychological interpretations of what happened and why.

In the March edition of the journal of the
British Psychological Society, The
Psychologist, Stephen
Reicher, Alex Haslam and Jay Van Bavel analyse the 'manifesto' of the
Christchurch killer. They conclude that he was following a form of 'toxic
leadership' which they associate with some current heads of state around the
world. They draw a contrast with the positive, inclusive leadership presented
by the New Zealand Prime Minister. You can read the article here

In New Zealand itself, the New Zealand Journal of Psychology
produced a Rapid-response issue after the Christchurch terror attacks (The New Zealand Journal of Psychology Vol 48, Issue 1, 2019
(ISSN:1179-7924)). The lead article is by Margaret Wetherell, who worked at the Open
University for many years and is an Emerita Professor in our School of
Psychology. Professor Wetherell is more cautious than
Reicher et al about what social psychology can contribute to our understanding
of the attacks. She suggests that many conventional social psychological
theories and concepts may be inadequate.

Wetherell's
own contribution to the discussion is an exploration of the 'acceptable
discourse' and the lines of logic and feeling that appear in public and
personal responses. This is more difficult ground for the reader than the
previous article because it challenges the ways of thinking, feeling and
viewing the world which constitute a shared culture of privilege in the world
today: 'the flow of ideology/identity/affect... which authorises and
legitimates feelings and actions, and which formulates common sense'. Wetherell's
article invites us to consider our own positions in relation to that culture,
and the extent to which we either question or support it. You can read the
article here https://www.psychology.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/Wetherell-6-9.pdf

Both
the articles, by Reicher et al and by Wetherell, refer very positively to the
public statements of the New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Ahern. She
received worldwide attention for her inclusive identification with the victims
of the attacks: 'They are us'.

Her
statements deny any distinction between recent migrants and other New
Zealanders, defining the national community, 'us', as united by shared values and
aspirations rather than more traditional connections. She emphasised that the
newcomers to New Zealand had chosen it as their country.

A
similar idea to 'They are us' is repeated in a Facebook post circulated by many
New Zealanders: kia kaha This is Not
Who We Are! (The Maori words kia kaha
mean 'stay strong' and were used by the Maori Battalion during World War 2.) Both
Ahern's claim and the kia kaha post
are examples of what Michael Billig (1992) called 'banal nationalism': the
presentation of a national community to itself. (Previous posts on this blog
discuss some British examples.) Billig described this presentation as 'banal'
not because it is unimportant but because it reinforces the image of the nation
through repeated, everyday acts and references, for instance, to 'we' and 'us'
and, here, to New Zealanders as principled, strong and ready to fight for what
they believe.

Many
of us have felt an intense and positive emotional response to 'They are us' and
'This is Not Who We Are'. Yet it is important to be alert to how similar ideas
can be used negatively as well as positively. The same 'common sense' and 'flow
of ideology/identity/affect' can be invoked to legitimate very different
feelings and actions.

For
example, in a world of moving populations, it is obviously good to welcome
newcomers. It is good to open the national community to more people than those
with 'born and bred' connections of family and history. However, it is perhaps
less good to imply that the only people who belong are those with the same
values as everyone else, as if living together doesn't require some tolerance
of difference. And while 'choice' can be positive, it also suggests that
migrants always have alternatives, as if they have shopped selectively for a
new country, rather than, in many cases, feeling themselves forced to go
wherever they can, for reasons that may or may not be visible to others.

Social psychologists who study citizenship
increasingly define it in terms of what citizens do rather than what they are. (This
is a topic in the module Advancing Social
Psychology DD317, in Block 3 by Rachel Manning, Eleni Andreouli and Debra
Gray.) The interest is in the practices which make people part of the national
society, rather than the laws which entitle them to passports. Again, this way
of thinking is potentially both positive and negative. In the UK, it is invoked
positively in campaigns that highlight how immigrants and refugees contribute
to British society. However, a more problematic aspect appears in
the case of Shamima Begum whose British citizenship was revoked because she joined
Islamic State. If good citizenly behaviour should entitle people to official
citizenship status (although it doesn't, in many cases), the logical converse
is that bad behaviour becomes an excuse to exclude people from the national
community. Yet every society has always had its
dissenters and lawbreakers, as well as frankly unpleasant people, and sometimes
we may find ourselves counted in the 'bad' category. Our differences will require discussion
and an attempt to understand what may at first seem incomprehensible. The
negotiation will be laborious, and never completed but it is also necessary,
because 'us' and 'them' are never entirely separate.

Spring as a time of hope, or not?

In this week's social psychology blog,
Stephanie Taylor looks ahead to the UK holiday weekend and considers the
meanings of Easter and futures, and reasons to be cheerful, or not.

Today people in the UK
will be looking forward to the Easter weekend with various expectations.
For some, it is a holiday, although Bank Holidays are perhaps less relevant now
that so many workers are self-employed. For them, and for others like OU students,
Easter may appear as exactly the opposite, that is, an opportunity to do extra
work. For some people, Easter is important as a major Christian festival. But
perhaps the strongest associations of this long weekend are with the beginning
of spring as a season of fertility and growth, symbolised by all those eggs and
rabbits.

These associations
offer different possibilities for constructing time, and where we are in relation
to it. Think about the UK calendar year, with its attached commercial messages.
It begins with a noticeable proliferation of tv programmes and articles about
losing weight and abandoning bad habits. January is presented as the month in
which to live healthily, perhaps by abstaining from alcohol (Dry January), and
giving up meat (Veganuary). Shop displays and advertisements feature sports
clothes and special offers on gym membership, so this is all about looking
ahead and making an effort now in order to improve ourselves later. Then in
February the health priorities are replaced in the lead up to Valentine's Day
which is, supposedly, a time not only for love and romance but also chocolate,
champagne and meals out. The focus shifts abruptly from the future back to now,
to enjoyment of the moment - or perhaps, for people whose experience doesn't
fit the shiny image, to a feeling of disappointment and even failure.

Immediately after
February 14th, supermarkets replace displays of chocolate hearts with chocolate
eggs as we reach the current point in the year, the lead up to Easter. Shopping
wise, there is also pressure to buy new clothes, outdoor furniture and seasonal
food - the first asparagus and, if you've forgotten about Veganuary, spring
lamb. Again, we are positioned in the present, supposedly enjoying ourselves,
but we are also looking ahead to future pleasures, including a fantasy of a
summer which is based more on other countries than the UK. Directly after
the Easter holiday, we can expect the future focus to become stronger, with a
renewed emphasis on healthy living as everyone is encouraged to lose weight in
preparation for summer holidays at the beach.

All of this is
completely familiar and might seem amusingly trivial. However, it indicates how
our experience of the supposedly 'natural' passing of time, including seasonal
change, is shaped by the society and culture. For social psychologists who
utilise analytic approaches like thematic and discursive analysis, one interest
in this kind of teasing out of meanings is their link to values and priorities,
to what is right and wrong, and what needs to be acted upon. The cycle of
months and activities emphasises ongoing life, comforting us with its seemingly
reliable repetition. More linear constructions can position us at an endpoint.
For example, the current news stories about Brexit present the UK as straggling
towards the finish, of membership of the EU or just the attempt to relinquish
it, and possibly the collapse of the whole political system which enabled the
referendum in the first place.

The most important
news story this Easter is probably the current protests initiated by Extinction
Rebellion 'against the criminal inaction on the climate and ecological crisis'.
As thousands of people demonstrate in London and other cities, we might feel
that we occupy several conflicting positions in time, simultaneously. The
protesters are challenging the optimism of spring, pointing to ongoing
degradation of the environment rather than seasonal renewal. They are not alone
in being concerned. For instance, many of the people who are staying at home
this weekend to work on their gardens and allotments might also feel that this
spring is not the same new beginning as the cycle implies, because of ominous
signs like rising temperatures and other strange weather patterns, and the declining
numbers of bees and other familiar insects. So where are we all positioned now?
Are we winding down to an end, of many aspects of the natural environment, of
thousands of species, and of the way we currently occupy the planet, because
more and more places are becoming unliveable? These are the threats, quite
literally of the end of life as we know it. Yet the climate change protests
themselves might be viewed as a new beginning, as action that will produce real
responses on a sufficient scale to be effective, by social actors who have
previously not engaged with the issue (it is interesting, for example, to see
the Governor of the Bank of England warning business of the money losses that
climate change involves). So now, in springtime, these protests themselves are
perhaps our strongest reason for optimism and the hope of new beginnings. Happy
Easter!

The lie of the future?

Friday, 29 Mar 2019, 11:45

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A current exhibition,
'The lie of the land', at Milton Keynes Gallery looks at the founding of the city
in which the OU is located. Some of the issues raised by the exhibition, about
past visions of the future, link to novelty and the classic concept of
'emergence', the focus of a seminar organised by the Culture and Social
Psychology group with other social psychologists, from the University of East
London. This week's blog for social psychology and DD317 introduces the concept
and some related issues.

As the Open University celebrates its 50th
anniversary, there is a different kind of commemoration of its location, Milton
Keynes, in a new exhibition, 'The lie of the land', at MK Gallery. The
exhibition presents changing images of the British landscape, including the
development of Milton Keynes as a built environment that was intended to be 'a
city greener than the surrounding countryside'. The exhibition includes a short
film, co-funded by the Open University, in which the artist Gareth Jones looks
back over early plans for the city. He suggests that the optimism which
surrounded its original development derived from a combination of two social
revolutions, the post-war reforms that established the welfare state as part of
a vision of a fairer society, and the events of 1968, including student
protests, which are often seen as initiating significant contemporary values
and freedoms. Jones shows that many of the original designs for Milton Keynes
were never followed through, including a sculpture park, elaborate public
playgrounds and a lakeside disco. Other dramatic features that did get built,
like an elevated pedestrian tunnel, have subsequently been demolished.

The film prompts reflections on the complex relationship
between past and future, such as how earlier futures can disappear or go out of
date. (A notable feature of the drawings is the distinctive 70s fashions worn
by the 'future' people.) More prosaically, the film reminds us of the
difficulty of knowing the future. This is a particular issue for social
psychologists because so much of the project of psychology is about attempting
to enable prediction, for instance, by tracing cause and effect, modelling
processes and outcomes, or examining people and their behaviour in great detail.
A major attraction of the discipline is its implied promise to explain us to ourselves
and, as a logical extension, offer the possibility of managing the lives ahead
of us and reducing our future problems. Yet there are strong arguments, including
from some psychologists, that such a project will inevitably fail. Our lives
are too complex, there are too many factors in play, any model can only be a
simplification.

These issues prompted the Culture and Social Psychology
group at the OU, CuSP, to organise a seminar with social psychologists from the
University of East London in order to discuss emergence. Emergence was defined
by the psychologist G.H.Mead as 'the occurrence of something which is more than
the processes which have led up to it and which by its change, continuance or
disappearance, adds to later passages a content they would not otherwise have
possessed.' Emergence is therefore about novelty, futures and the
unpredictable. The specific concerns of the seminar's presenters include emotion,
mental health, Brexit and the ways that psychological research can be
conducted.

Commemoration and memory

Friday, 8 Mar 2019, 11:23

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The OU is celebrating its 50th birthday! This is of course a big event for everyone involved with the
university. As the official message puts it, 'In our
anniversary year, we will tell our
story and create moments that inspire pride, unity and involvement.' This
kind of commemoration is also of interest to psychologists, and especially
social psychologists, because of the complex connections between remembering
and the telling of memories. In this week's blog for DD317 and social
psychology, Stephanie Taylor discusses some of the issues involved.

Most people are aware
that remembering doesn't operate as a kind of mental 'video replay' of the past.
They may have experienced doubt about their own memory of an event like a
family party, wondering if they recall the actual occasion or just what they
were told about it subsequently. Discursive psychologists are interested in the
construction of memories. This is not an argument that all memories are false
but a suggestion that two questions need to be asked about anyone's account of
what they remember. The first is 'Why are you talking about this (memory) now?'
and the second, 'Why are you talking about it in this way?'.

The point of the first
question is that a story about the past fulfils functions in the present, for
instance, in the case of a commemoration, to inspire pride and encourage unity.
The point of the second question is that a story about the past is always just
one possible version. There could be a different telling, if only because memory
is inevitably partial. Otherwise, as the psychologist Jens Brockmeier has put
it, 'completely recalling one's life would take as long as one's life itself' (2002
p.23). Total memory is impossible, so we should recognise that any account of
what is remembered is a selective construction, with a purpose.

Unsurprisingly, the
OU's commemoration has already prompted discussions about the best stories to
be told. What version of the university's history should be presented? Which
events and people should be selected for recall? It is all very enjoyable. One
of my own top choices would be a story from the valedictory lecture of Steven
Rose, the OU's first Professor of Biology. He recalled the first ever OU
biology course. Every student was sent, in the post, a package of study
materials which contained a live goldfish, to observe, and a pickled sheep's
brain, to dissect.

Some serious issues
around commemoration were raised at a recent seminar organised by the Culture
and Social Psychology (CuSP) group. The occasion was a presentation by Dr John
E. Richardson, on his research on the commemoration of the Holocaust. He
discussed how the remembering of these horrific events is changing with the
passing of time, especially now that few survivors remain to present their own
memories. Richardson analysed accounts presented at the UK's Holocaust Memorial
Day, showing how the sombre commemorative speeches by contemporary politicians,
although respectful, were carefully crafted to fulfil present purposes in line
with government and party priorities.

The presentation and
the discussion produced strong responses in the seminar audience. One view was
that the contemporary speeches were betraying the commemoration of the
Holocaust. The discursive explanation of inevitably selective construction
seemed inadequate. The seminar even discussed the extreme argument that the
commemoration should be discontinued entirely, to prevent its further exploitation.
But there is an alternative, more positive conceptualisation that is also
informed by social psychology. This involves considering commemoration in terms
of sociocultural actions. According to this, the speeches and even the stage
managing have value as social practices that acknowledge the past and engage
new generations in marking its significance. Viewed in this way, commemoration
has many parallels with religious rituals, so it is not a coincidence that it
often borrows language and other details from organised religion. The commemorative
event as a whole requires individuals to obey rules and limit any claims for
personal attention. This interpretation is linked to process psychology. It
also takes us back to discursive psychology, but to the first of the two
questions, not the second: 'Why are we talking about these memories now?'.
The answer, of course, is that we consider that they continue to be so
important and the events that they refer to must never be forgotten.

The OU's commemoration
is obviously a different set of actions appropriate to a different purpose,
although there are also some connections in the value that is being placed on
education and understanding. The OU's 50th birthday is about the
past and the future, about changes that have occurred (including in teaching
materials) and also the values we want to hold onto. We are expecting to hear
some good stories about people's memories.

Olympic medal winning student finds DD317 a golden experience

Thursday, 28 Feb 2019, 10:11

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This week we resume the DD317 / social psychology blog
with a post about a former DD317 student, the Olympian Etienne Stott. Paul
Stenner, Professor of Social Psychology at the Open University and DD317
presentation chair, talked to Etienne about the connections between sport, life
and social psychology.

I recently had the pleasure of
interviewing OU Psychology student and Olympic gold medalist Etienne
Stott. One of the great things about working at the OU is that we get students
from all kinds of backgrounds and with all kinds of different life experiences,
but it is not every day that I get to chat to an Olympian. What made this
experience even more interesting is that Etienne had recently completed a Level
3 Social Psychology module with which I am involved, namely DD317. In fact, he
was quite fired-up about it! So not only did we talk about his winning
(with teammate Time Bailie) of a Gold Medal at the London 2012 Olympic Games in
the two-man Slalom canoe event, but we also got to discuss how his engagement with social psychology has
influenced his way of thinking about key social issues, such as the felt
responsibilities of athletes as role models.

As a social
psychologist, I’m fascinated by questions like how important the support of a
crowd is for a sporting performance, and the extent to which the input of a
sport psychologist might genuinely enhance abilities. Also, a few years ago I
did some research on the concept of ‘being in the zone’ (or ‘BITZ’) which is
closely connected to the idea that under certain conditions a performer can
enter a flow state which might
further enhance their abilities. It
was great to get Etienne’s take on that idea, which, in his case, really came
from lived experience.

Finally, as
you will see if you watch the interview, Etienne Stott is not all about sport.
He has some quite inspiring things to say about world politics, including the need for a more active approach to environmental issues.
He makes it quite clear that what he learned on DD317 was extremely useful in
helping him articulate a sophisticated perspective, and I’m delighted that he
now wants to help spread the word of social psychology. If you’re interested in
finding out more, have a listen to the interview here:

Andrea Levy at the Open University

Friday, 15 Feb 2019, 16:48

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Edited by Stephanie Taylor, Friday, 15 Feb 2019, 16:50

Stephanie Taylor writes about the author Andrea Levy.

Andrea
Levy who died this week, has been deservedly celebrated in a number of
articles and obituaries. She is probably best known as the author of the
prize-winning novel 'Small Island'. Open University students may also be aware
that she received an OU honorary doctorate, awarded in March 2014, and I am
writing now to recall her acceptance of the degree. The speech she gave was
very warmly received and it reminded me of another of her novels 'Fruit of the
Lemon' which is built up as a succession of distinctive British and Caribbean voices.

In the speech, Andrea
Levy introduced the voice of her mother, Amy, a teacher who came to the UK in 1948
with a secret ambition to attend university here. However, Amy's initial
experience was more about the closing down, not opening up, of opportunities
because her Jamaican teaching qualifications were not recognised. She obtained other
work and eventually did enter tertiary study, at the OU. In those pre-computer
days, some course material was broadcast, usually late in the evening. Levy
described her younger self coming in to see what her mother was doing, and
finding her watching 'some hairy man' lecturing on tv. (At this point in the
speech, everyone in the hall automatically looked at the bearded PVC who was
chairing the ceremony. He blushed.) Levy went on to describe how her mother
persevered with her studies and eventually completed her degree, becoming one
of the OU's first graduates. The conclusion of the speech was enacted as a
conversation between mother and daughter, in their respective Jamaican and
British accents. The daughter announced that she was accepting this honorary
doctorate in memory of her mother, then voiced the imagined Amy's indignant
response: 'So they're giving it without you doing any of the work!'.

The audience at the
ceremony loved the speech. It made us all laugh, it showed
that the brilliant writer was also a highly skilled performer, with superb
comic timing, and every OU graduate appreciated the recognition of their own
hard work to complete a degree. We were also privileged to experience an
original piece of Levy's writing. The backgrounding of the story and the small
imagined dialogue connected her and us, now and then, the ways that family and
society encircle our own life experiences. We were lucky to be there!

Culture, art and a social psychological issue

Sunday, 23 Sep 2018, 08:14

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A new BBC series on the arts
of Oceania is a useful reminder of issues around culture and, perhaps less
obviously, different theories about the nature of people. The Level 3 module Advancing social psychology (DD317)
discusses culture, including the sometimes problematic assumptions that derive
from classic psychological studies of 'other' people that were conducted in
countries under European colonial rule. The BBC series aims to avoid these
assumptions but still raises issues that are interesting to consider. In this
week's blog for DD317, Stephanie Taylor reflects on culture, art and
individuals.

One recent programme in the BBC series on Oceanic art followed Yolngu Aboriginal people from Northern
Australia as they made a traditional musical instrument, a yidaki (often referred to as a
didgeridoo). The instrument is a long wooden tube and the making process began
with a group of people searching in the forest for a suitable tree to carve it
from. One man explained their belief that the yidaki in a certain sense already
exists and is calling to the searchers to be found. He also said that they
needed to find a tree which had been eaten out by termites and the film showed
him hitting at trunks with a machete, to check whether they had a hollow sound.
The search therefore seemed to combine a kind of thinking that might be
associated with a traditional cultural belief (the yidaki calling out), with a
more pragmatic evidence-based practice (testing for a hollow trunk). The latter might be dismissed simply as
common sense but it also derives from experimental science and can be
understood as part of the culture that dominates contemporary Western
societies, including Australia and the UK.

Both these examples of culture, the Yolngu
Aboriginal and the contemporary Western, combine a way of thinking with ways of
living and doing things. In that sense, the two cultures appear equivalent and
it can be argued that the Yolngu
Aboriginal people, as 21st century Australians, belong to both. Certainly the
programme shows the yidaki-makers comfortably combining old and new, for
example, when they use modern tools but traditional colours and designs in the
making process. However, in Western societies there is a general tendency to
attribute a lower status to traditional cultures and even to assume that these
are what the term 'culture' refers to. One reason is that Western societies
value innovation whereas traditional cultures, by definition, are assumed to
resist change, holding onto the past. Cultural 'authenticity' is often assumed
to depend on a lack of innovation. This can create a kind of trap for
indigenous people, as if they must choose between living separately from
contemporary society, in order to preserve their culture, or else abandon that
culture completely.

In addition, 'culture' is often associated with determination, as if the
people who belong to a traditional culture maintain their ways of thinking and
living without reflection or choice; there is an assumption that they simply
think and do what the culture dictates. Culture is also linked to a lack of individuality,
whereas Western societies tend to prioritise individual rationality and
autonomy. Yet these associations and assumptions can be questioned. Western
societies do possess a culture of their own, as already noted, and this
includes 'common sense' ideas which are usually accepted without question;
Western people do not always act rationally or autonomously. On the other hand,
it is entirely possible for people of a non-Western culture to respect tradition
and collective values with awareness and full understanding of possible
alternatives. (Indeed, the 'preservation' of a traditional culture can become a
political strategy by which powerful individuals manage an entirely
contemporary conflict, for example, around the rights of women or the
possession of property – but that is a subject for another discussion.)

These points are of particular interest in relation to the yidaki makers
because of the significance for art. The Western image of the artist is of an
individual, possibly working within a particular period or school but ultimately
transcending it. His work is his own - the image is masculine, even if all the
artists are not. The work he produces is identified with his name, and usually
marked with it. But if an artist belongs to a traditional culture, there is a
tendency for the artistic practice or process of making not to be attributed to
individual intention or decision or vision. Instead, the 'art' is seen merely
as the expression of the culture. The work is not identified with the maker. The
image of the individual artist is replaced by the image of the cultural
representative.

This way of thinking about traditional art has of course been
challenged. As just one example, the work of Aboriginal artists is now credited
to individual makers as well as the traditional culture they identify with.
However, similar problematic assumptions continue to be extended in subtle but
definite ways to other artists who are marginalised within larger Western
societies. For example, Black artists can find that their work is viewed mainly
as a statement of their colour or ethnicity, and then potentially dismissed as
political rather than artistic, as Sonia Boyce has discussed recently with
reference to UK art in the 1950s https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/jul/30/whoever-heard-of-a-black-artist-britains-hidden-art-historySimilarly,
the US artist Jean-Michel Basquiat was deeply frustrated that his work
referring to race, and racism, carried a diminished status, as if he had
produced it almost instinctively, as an expression of his cultural experience.
And women artists can find that their work is categorised in a similar way, so
that references, for example, to sexuality or maternal feelings are reduced to
a kind of outpouring of womanness and therefore a lesser achievement than the
supposedly more considered work of male artists.

Wake up! Foucault’s warning on fake news

Wednesday, 5 Sep 2018, 08:36

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Edited by Stephanie Taylor, Saturday, 6 Oct 2018, 07:02

How new is fake news?
Is it a feature of a contemporary ‘post truth’ society, or does it have a
longer history? A new short film links the phenomenon back to the famous
thinker Michel Foucault. In this week’s blog for Advancing social psychology
(DD317), Professor Paul Stenner writes about the film, and about the influence
of Foucault’s thinking on social psychology.

In
partnership with the OU, the BBC have recently been making a series of ‘ideas’
short films. Each is only a few minutes long, and the aim is to get an ‘idea’
across in a quick but effective way. One of the latest of these short films
asks how the French polymath Michel Foucault might have responded to the recent
phenomenon of ‘fake news’, and to the idea that we now live in a world that is
‘post-truth’. ‘Fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ point to similar things, but the
latter is a more academic concept whilst the former is now firmly associated
with Donald Trump’s repeated complaint that ‘the media’ is politically
motivated to make up negative stories about him. The short film is called Wake up! Foucault’s warning on fake news
and it was written and narrated by Angie Hobbs from the University of Sheffield
with Paul Stenner (an OU Social Psychologist and current Chair of DD317) and
Cristina Chimisso (an OU Philosopher) acting as academic advisors.

Foucault,
who died in 1984, is one of the most cited thinkers of the 20th
Century. He is difficult to label because his style of thought moved easily
across disciplinary boundaries, mixing philosophy, psychology, history and
political activism. After his death, his ideas about the relationship between
knowledge, power and subjectivity (or sense of self) began to have a big
influence on social psychology, and indeed they crop up on various occasions in
DD317 Advancing Social Psychology.
Instead of assuming that sciences like psychology and economics provide
objective truth about the human condition, Foucault created new ways of using
historical data to demonstrate that these human sciences emerged under quite
specific circumstances as part of new ways of governing and disciplining
people. He did not approach these sciences by asking ‘are they true?’ but
instead asked ‘what do they do?’ and
‘how do they actually function socially and psychologically?’ If Foucault is
right, this means that ‘truth’ cannot easily be separated from ‘power’. Indeed,
Foucault thought of them as two sides of the same thing called power/knowledge and he was particularly
interested in how power/knowledge shapes people’s sense of self or
‘subjectifies’ them.

Ironically
enough, some people are now inclined to blame thinkers like Michel Foucault for
eroding the difference between knowledge and power and for ushering in a new
world of post-truth in which a new breed of trickster politicians can act as if
the truth were whatever they say it is, so long as they repeat it loudly on
social media. The short film does entertain this hypothesis, but it also
suggests that Foucault, had he lived to witness it, would be highly critical of
the notion of the ‘fake news’ of a ‘post-truth’ era, and would assert the truth
of the oppressed to those in positions of power, inviting us to ‘wake up’ to
the unequal realities of our present moment. To judge for yourself, you can see
the short film at https://www.bbc.com/ideas/videos/wake-up-foucaults-warning-on-fake-news/p06gzcn4

I read the news today... and watched tv

Thursday, 30 Aug 2018, 11:51

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Edited by Stephanie Taylor, Saturday, 6 Oct 2018, 07:03

The Level 3 module Advancing social psychology (DD317) uses the concerns of
contemporary social psychology as a lens for viewing people in their social
context, and particularly the context of contemporary British society. As we
look ahead to the new presentation of DD317, this week's blog by Stephanie Taylor draws connections
between current news stories and some of the module content.

Windrush:

The Windrush scandal
is about British citizens from Caribbean backgrounds, and some other parts of
the world, who have been wrongly classified as illegal migrants, and in many
cases deported. This distressing and disturbing situation has rightly received
a lot of media attention. It points to how we understand citizenship, as not
only a legal but also a moral and emotional issue. News stories emphasise the
length of time that the people concerned
have lived in Britain, the work they have done for British society, and in some
cases the government, their family connections and their personal
identification as British. All of these points relate to the DD317 topic of
citizenship, and to new social psychological approaches which understand
citizenship in terms of participation and other social practices.

#MeToo, and more allegations of sexual
misconduct:

The twists and turns of
the #MeToo story continue. This week they include, in the US, accusations by a
young man against one of the first women to 'speak out', and in Scotland, a
heated exchange of allegations and denials around the behaviour of a male
politician. The #MeToo movement is part of the feminism embraced by a new
generation of women. DD317 discusses feminism as an example of activism which
challenges inequalities and power imbalances, and therefore has important
parallels with other political movements and action against inequality (It is
noticeable, for example, that there is now increased publicity for allegations
of bullying, whoever these involve.) (Another DD317 topic is cyberbullying).
The module also discusses gender, looking at new femininities and masculinities.
Another focus is the limitations of considering inequalities in terms of one
category only; alongside gender, we need to consider class, race, age... so how
can this be managed in academic work?

School exam results:

In a news story
that comes up every year, two of the points noted this time round were that in
GCSE, boys have 'caught up' with girls, and at A-level, fewer students are
studying 'modern European languages' like German. The first again raises gender
issues. The second point prompts interesting questions about Britain's future
connections to other countries (and of course the B-word, Brexit), and also
about what qualifications are expected to be useful when today's school
students become tomorrow's aspiring workers. DD317 considers what it means to
live in a globalised world. It investigates work and employment, looking at the
changing nature of work and the expectations that are likely to be faced by
future workers.

And on a lighter note, the Great British
Bake-Off:

This year's series
continues the formula which lightens so many people's Tuesday evenings, with a
few tweaks, like a vegan week. One interest for social psychology is in the
programme as an example of 'banal nationalism' (a term from the work of Michael
Billig, 1992). GBBO presents us with a positive image of our own society (Hint:
the clues are in the words 'Great' and 'British'). There is, first, a
wonderfully multicultural mix of people who bring into their cooking the range
of food traditions that are firmly part of contemporary British eating. The contestants
also represent a variety of social backgrounds and life roles (e.g. a stay-at-home
dad) in order to illustrate the ideals of diversity and tolerance that also
characterise contemporary British values (we hope). The programme is, however,
a contest, celebrating competition. Tolerance stops at the point of judging and
each week someone is a loser. They will be hugged before they leave, but they
will have to go. Many critical psychologists argue that the 'neoliberal' image
of society as a competition between individuals is too widely accepted. DD317
discusses the concept of neoliberalism, and the lone competitor as a model for
the person, in life and also in a lot of psychology.

These are just a few of the
possible connections (a future blog will look at more). DD317 students are
invited to use their independent study time to follow up similar connections
between the module content, their lives and the world 'out there', because as
social psychological subjects we are not only part of that world but shaped by
it. To learn more about DD317, you can look at the new Open Learn course course

Changing our thinking: Process and progress

Monday, 23 Jul 2018, 14:30

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Can we break
out of established ways of thinking? Are there new ways to understand ourselves
in the world? This week's blog for DD317 Advancing
social psychology reports on research from psychologists who belong to the
Association for Process Thought (APT). As the name suggests, their research
begins by looking not at how the world 'is' but at the ongoing processes
(actions, movements, change) that make up our social environment. The blog, by Professor
Paul Stenner, reports on some of the research presented at the APT's meeting in
June 2018.

At this meeting of the Association of
Process Thought, there were presentations which all used the concept of process
to open up new ways of understanding three very different but important aspects
of contemporary life: religion, intimate relationships, and environmental
destruction.

The first presentation, by Martin
Savransky (Goldsmiths College, University of London), considered how we might
understand experiences that are often dismissed as irrational, including
religious experiences. The presentation discussed a book by anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann called When God Talks Back, about charismatic
evangelists. Rather than focussing on ‘belief’, Luhrmann’s work is
consistent with a processual account that concerns the felt reality of
religious experience. Through asking her participants how they experience the
unseen reality of God, Luhrmann is able to show the relative irrelevance of
heady thought in comparison to a slow relationship of feeling, embodied and
embedded within practices. Arguably,
this emphasis on process enables a different understanding of religious
experience, escaping from the now clichéd and obstructive question of whether
God exists.

The second presentation, Process in action: Relational drug use, by Dr Katie Andersen, concerned intimate couple
relationships. Again, rather than focussing on what intimacy 'is', the
presentation approached intimacy as a set of practices. This opens up
possibilities of understanding the significance of movement, space and material
objects for relationships. Andersen's research considers how chemical
interventions, specifically the use of the drug MDMA, can contribute to the
creation of new subjectivities which alter boundaries within the self, between
self and other, and between self and world. In a social world where
recreational drug use is increasingly prevalent, this possibly contentious
research considers how such use might function within contemporary lives.

The third presentation, Bio-semiotics and Integral ecology, was given by Dr John
Pickering from the University of Warwick. His concern is the geopolitical reality of our time in which ecological
degradation follows the vast and technologically mediated global increase in human
numbers, associated with a widening gap between rich and poor, and the ongoing
political struggles to control remaining planetary resources, like water. In
this context, he suggests, there is a pressing need for new relational and
processual modes of thought. He proposes a shift from mechanistic being (mere
existence) to organic becoming (productive happening), suggesting that this
ushers in a new understanding of the world at all levels, from the workings of
the brain and mind, through to the organic interactions animating the minutest
portions of life and evolution. His argument is that this kind of radical
re-thinking is needed in order to address a problem of such magnitude.

Of
course this brief overview of the presentations cannot cover the details of the
arguments but it indicates some of the interdisciplinary thinking which is
taking forward the field of social psychology.

The state of the NHS: a social psychological view

Thursday, 12 Jul 2018, 08:39

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Edited by Stephanie Taylor, Thursday, 12 Jul 2018, 08:43

As we celebrate the 70th birthday of
the NHS, Stephanie Taylor has been watching tv programmes about health. She considers
some of the issues confronting the health service and the health of the UK more
generally. Are we taking enough care of ourselves? Could we manage without a
national health service? Is the NHS a support system for 'us' or for 'them'?

To mark the 70th
birthday of the NHS, there have been a number of tv programmes about its
achievements and problems. The programmes generally present the stories of
people who have turned to healthcare providers and received support, for
instance, when babies were born or accidents occurred or serious illness was
diagnosed. The message of the programmes is that as a society, we need the
National Health Service, but it is struggling because we are making too many
demands on it.

Somewhat differently,
there continue to be many more light-hearted television programmes about the
UK's health which focus on personal responsibility. Adopting a 'before and
after' format, these usually begin by introducing a group of participants with
a current or potential health problem that is linked to bad lifestyle choices – going to the pub instead of the gym, eating
takeaways instead of home cooking, using the cooler bin of your fridge for chocolate
bars instead of vegetables. The programme's experts examine the participants,
collecting statistics and conducting medical tests (blood samples tend to
feature heavily). The participants then change their behaviours and are judged
to have improved their health. At the end of the programme, they promise to
persist with the healthier choices. They leave, looking forward to a
problem-free future.

The clear message of
the second group of programmes is that people should take more responsibility
for maintaining their own good health. This might seem entirely compatible with
the valuing of the NHS – by looking after ourselves, we will make fewer claims
on already overstretched health care providers. The idea that health problems
are a consequence of individual wrong decisions and actions can even seem
encouraging, because it suggests that each of us has control and can avoid the
need for care, if we live properly.

However, this focus on
the individual has some less positive implications, as many social
psychologists would note. It suggests fault, as if people only ever get ill
because they haven't made the necessary effort (not so!). The focus also closes
down any consideration of larger-scale factors that might impact on people's health,
such as poverty and overwork, or the increasing air pollution which is almost
unavoidable in many parts of the UK. And of course the focus also avoids
difficult discussions of why seemingly rational people might make bad 'choices',
as in the complex problems of substance abuse and addiction.

More subtly, the
emphasis on individual responsibility normalises independence, as if a claim on
other people is something shameful, to be avoided. (It is interesting and
ironic to note here that people who are celebrated as successful 'individuals' almost
inevitably mark their celebrity, wealth and political power by surrounding
themselves with supporters, such as servants, bodyguards and admirers – for
these 'top' people, dependence is apparently not a problem!)

The general
stigmatisation of need and dependence is the reason that so many people attempt
to manage in difficult circumstances without help, determined not to be 'a
burden'. Yet everyone requires support sometimes, and not only when they are
ill, or at the very beginning and end of their lives. Indeed, there is a
persuasive argument that no one can be entirely self-sufficient. Even those of
us who might claim to be 'free' of personal ties of family and friendship are
dependent on the complex interconnections that maintain markets, and keep
society functioning.

This is why social
psychologists insist on the importance of looking at people in context, not as
detached individuals. A social psychological interest extends beyond
interpersonal contacts and linked activities to the shared ideas and values
that enable all of us to communicate (and disagree). The same ideas make
sense of who we are and what we do.

So what does this kind
of approach indicate about the NHS? There seem to be two conflicting ideas in
play. The first is that the NHS is the safety net that is required when normal life
is interrupted, because people have been exceptionally unfortunate or, in many
cases, because they have not taken enough responsibility for themselves. This
view invites us to see NHS users as other people, because we all like to think of
ourselves as responsible, and lucky. The second interpretation is that in the
NHS today we can see all the care needs of our society exposed and brought
together to be dealt with by a single institution, including needs which
originate, for example, in an economy which excludes many people from the steady
employment and secure housing which would enable them to live 'well'. In this
second view, the NHS users are ourselves, all of us, because it is in the NHS
that we see our real nature as human beings, as inevitably interconnected and
in different ways dependent on each other.

Football, love and passion

Monday, 11 Jun 2018, 08:53

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Edited by Stephanie Taylor, Monday, 11 Jun 2018, 08:55

In the week that sees
the first fixtures in the FIFA World Cup, some of us are fully focused on
football and some of us are ... not so much. In this week's Open University social psychology
blog, David Kaposi, a DD317 author and member of presentation team, reflects on
the meanings of football, past and present, and why they might have changed.

These are the days of obligation. We are all supposed to
have a team – however weak our connection to it – a team to announce, a team to
follow, a team to love. Whether you like it or not, are male or not, interested
or, in fact, not, you cannot escape from the question “What’s your team?”, ”Who
do you support?”. You are of course, allowed not to answer, and if you don't no
further judgment will be pronounced but there will be a momentary silence. You
will understand what that means. It's not a crime, of course. It is just, you
know, curious.

The oppressive reality of what has become present day
football, much like the weather (but, then, who has ever asked anyone whether
they support summer or winter?), is inescapable. You will enjoy the World Cup! Even if you don't enjoy it then you
will follow it, and if you don't follow it then you will at least know about
it.

How has this come about? Because, some of us still faintly recall,
it was not always like this. There was a time when football belonged to some
people, much like cricket or collecting stamps. The people football belonged to
were not particularly glamorous and the accusation of hooliganism or barbarism
was never very distant from the discourses around football. “You throw a ball and twenty-two men start
running around it after it. What is there to like about that?”, as a family
friend used to ask every Sunday.

And if football lovers could always offer ripostes like
“Football players are privileged interpreters of communities around the world”
(Menotti,
manager) or “Everything I know about
morality and obligation, I owe to football” (Camus, goalkeeper), there was also the feeling that stamp
collectors too must have these kinds of justifications to comfort themselves
with.

So, what happened? In place of anything resembling an analysis, I
offer two observations.

I once met a man, dressed in red. He professed himself to be a
Manchester United supporter, indeed he said he “LOVED Man United”. I used to know a thing or two about United so I
engaged him along these lines in a relatively short conversation. At the end of
it we had established that he had no knowledge of any recent scores, let alone
actual games, and he had no clue who his team would be taking on in the near
future either. All that was left was the love.

Of love, of course, we have plenty. That, and passion. There are
constant reminders of them in the hype around football, but one also cannot
escape the feeling that even before the propaganda of love and passion, there
actually was love and passion in
football. Yet somehow, the words came to replace and in fact destroy what they
were supposed to merely report. Is this a lesson about the destructive power of
discourse, as if all the exaggerated talk eventually killed the real sentiment?

This capacity of words to take over something else brings me to my
second observation. This was a short comment I overheard from the then-manager
of Arsenal FC, Arsene Wenger: “It is difficult to play football”, he opined,
“when the opponent does not want to.” Those following football used to get
amused/irritated by such remarks from Wenger, inevitably offered following a
0-0 draw against Blackburn. He was just whingeing, trying to find excuses, they
would say. Yet whatever language game Wenger was playing after disappointing
results, his critics or commentators were attempting the self-same thing. What
was wilfully ignored was that having exactly eleven blokes on one side and eleven
blokes on the other no longer in itself constitutes fairness. It also does not
constitute a level playing field, where the possibility of a good competitive
game would solely depend on Blackburn’s intention
to play football (or not).

Blackburn did not destroy the game. What did destroy it (or, at any rate, the feelings with which the game
has traditionally been imbued) was not Blackburn’s intention on the pitch but
the financial reality of obscene inequality off it. The rest is… noise.

Safe at home in a place where I belong?

Tuesday, 29 May 2018, 08:31

Visible to anyone in the world

In a new blog for DD317 Advancing social psychology, Stephanie Taylor
discusses social research findings about place and belonging. She considers the
connections we draw between feeling at home and feeling safe and suggests that
these contribute to the continuing strong emotions around the Grenfell tower
tragedy. Stephanie will be speaking about place, belonging and identity at an
event for the London Festival of Architecture on Wednesday 6th June
2018 https://www.adamarchitecture.com/press/identity-and-the-identifiable-debate,-6th-june-2018-in-london.htm

I recently had a
conversation with a woman who is planning to move permanently to a country that
she knows well but has previously visited only for finite periods. Of course
this major life change has not been easy to arrange, but she was confident that
the red tape will be dealt with within a few months, and she will then migrate
permanently. ‘So’ I asked ‘will that feel like leaving home or going home?’
‘Going home’ she said confidently, and talked positively about the climate and
lifestyle of the new country, the ways that people interact there, and the
particular apartment she will live in. She feels that all of these match who
she is ,so she will belong there.

I was interested in
her response because it confirmed findings from research I conducted two
decades ago*, about home and identification with place. The research indicated
that people construct an image of home selectively, through what they value or
indeed notice about where they live, or would like to live. My research
participants talked about the place where they belonged, or wanted to belong.
It could be the interior of a house or flat, a street, neighbourhood, town or
city, or a particular landscape or part of the world. ‘Place’ is a fluid
concept, referring to any or indeed all of these, and this fluidity enabled the
participants to interpret a current or ideal place of residence as home, to
identify with features which matched who they felt themselves to be, or wanted
to be.

Our thoughts and
feelings about belonging are based in part on a shared cultural or discursive resource
which I call the ‘born and bred’ narrative. This is the familiar idea that each
of us is linked through birth and family to an original place (literally, a
place of ‘origin’). We are defined by this place and have a permanent claim on
it. Logically, of course, places change, people move and this kind of
connection through long-term and generational residence is unusual, especially
in contemporary affluent societies like the UK. However, people often continue
to claim it and may try to pin down the place by researching their family histories.
In my research, even though only a few participants continued to live where
they had grown up, I found that they invoked the born and bred narrative in
their constructions of home and belonging. For example, they might emphasise
that they had lived in their current place of residence for a long time, and they
had important memories attached to it. They might explain their feeling
of belonging by linking the place to the past, for example, through their
memories of childhood, or distant family connections, or by emphasising some similarity to their childhood
or family home. A number planned to move ‘back’ to the childhood place at some later
point in their lives.

But the selective
interpretation in this ‘identity work’ inevitably has its limits. The participants’
accounts emphasised personal connections, but belonging in a place is also
social, requiring some recognition and acceptance by other people. The woman
who is changing country will almost certainly find her status challenged.
People will note her accent or refer to her recent arrival. Her status as a
newcomer may be invoked in trivial disagreements (‘we don’t do things like
that’). More seriously, people’s claims to belong can be contested by the
actions of others. This can occur in small ways. For example, when new
neighbours interrupt local routines, perhaps by making noise or dropping
rubbish, longer term residents may feel that their claims on a place are not
being respected, as if they no longer belong. More seriously, crime, and
especially crime against the person, like mugging, is an enormous threat to
belonging. People who live in areas of rising crime are likely to feel that
they are being ‘driven out’, because ultimately one of the most important
associations of home and belonging is being in a place that is safe.

These connections have
appeared with particular poignancy in the recent testimonials to people who
died in the Grenfell tower fire. At the Grenfell inquiry, relatives and friends
have been talking about the victims, and have referred again and again to the
length of those people’s residence, in the tower itself, in the North
Kensington neighbourhood, in London and Britain. The testimonials have
emphasised that the victims were people who felt they belonged, locally and
nationally, and were also recognised by others to belong, as valued citizens
and members of the community. The testimonials are statements of loss and
tributes to the personal qualities of the people who were lost, and also a
protest at the betrayal that the fire involved. These victims were people at
home, where they belonged and should have been safe. The failures that enabled
the fire to kill them are therefore additionally a failure to respect the
important personal and social values attached to home, so ultimately a threat
to all of our claims to belong.

OU education as a social project

Tuesday, 27 Mar 2018, 15:34

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In this week's blog for DD317 Advancing social psychology, Stephanie
Taylor and colleagues from the School of Psychology examine education through a
'social' lens, setting out some of the issues (and making a few links to DD317
material).

Psychologists
have always been closely engaged with the study of education, developing theory
and practice around teaching and learning at all levels, from early child
development to tertiary and lifelong education. To reduce this to an individual 'teacher' and
'learner' is too simple. Psychologists would draw attention to the relevance of
technologies, contexts, practices and relationships. Of course a technology can
be as simple as a chalkboard or as complex as a piece of customised software
but it is always utilised within a context, as part of a practice, and social
psychologists in particular would point out the social nature of those
practices. The social is relevant in many ways, from the original motivation
for learning at all, to the associations it may carry, to the implications for
our identities and for society generally.

It is easy
to recognise that people want to learn, especially as adults, because of the
value attached to it in society. There is the conventional status of being an
educated person, well-qualified, perhaps a graduate. There is also the notion
that learning is a form of personal development (DD317 students might recognise
the new version of this associated with 'entrepreneurship', discussed by
Rosalind Gill in Block 4) and of growth – most of us would associate education
with the acquiring of new maturity. This also explains some of the difficulties
of learning and education. In an interview for DD317, Ian Burkitt discusses an
issue faced by people studying nursing. Part of their learning involved the
taking up of the new professional identity, and this could entail losses as
well as gains. A similar, painful story was told by the eminent US political and
social activist, Bella Abzug. She said that when she crossed the stage at her
graduation, she felt that she had simultaneously fulfilled her father's
ambition for her to succeed, and also made herself into someone so different
from him (a working class immigrant) that she had partly severed their
connection.

The
associations of learning are particularly strong for adults. Few of us can
escape from the memories of school, positive and negative. It's no coincidence
that many people who study as adults prefer to do so in a context as different
as possible from their early education. If you have bad memories of school,
then even small details like addressing the tutor by their first name (instead
of 'Miss' or 'Sir') or using different technologies (a computer instead of a
pen) can help make your educational experience different. But there will
probably also be points when the experience returns, positively or negative,
and that, again, is addressed by social educational practices. The concept of
scaffolding, born out of the work of Vygotsky but more deeply explored by
another great psychologist, Jerome Bruner, has shown psychologists how people
can be enabled to fulfil their educational potentials in ways that they never
thought possible. Scaffolding refers to a process where the learner is actively
supported by a teacher or peer so that they achieve their goal much more quickly
than if they learned unassisted. In the OU, we do this by generating teaching
activities and interactive materials that encourage learners to take steps towards
solving a critical problem. The whole 'OU system' is a complex form of teaching
developed to help students maintain their goals, find solutions and stay
motivated.

I have
already mentioned society as shaping the values we attach to learning and
education. Academics who take a critical approach, considering power and inequalities,
would point to additional social connections. First, it has long been
recognised that education has an economic value for society, because of the
specific skills acquired through education and training, and also the more
general capacity for learning that will enable educated people to adapt to
change and acquire new skills. (This is of course particularly relevant given
the current rate of technological change: the IT skills acquired by students
today will soon be outdated, but the experience and confidence in relation to
IT should make it easier for them to tackle the next round of new
developments.)

A second
point here is that education can help people to participate in society (DD317
students will note the connection to Block 3!). There are strong arguments, for
example, from the work of the philosopher and psychologist John Dewey and the
sociologist Craig Calhoun, that education prepares people to engage critically
in the public sphere and thereby to challenge injustices in society. For these
reasons, it can be argued that education is a social good (like clean air) that
benefits society generally and therefore should be paid for by society, through
taxes, rather than by individuals. In Calhoun's words, a university has a public
mission and historical purpose ‘to educate citizens in general, to share
knowledge, to distribute it as widely as possible, and to produce it in accord
with publicly articulated purposes (as well as on the assumption of eventual
public benefit)’ (Calhoun 2006: 19).

To some
extent, that argument has lost acceptance in recent years, especially in
relation to university tuition fees, but it remains powerful. For example, it
underpins most discussions about pre-school and school education, through the
logic that society 'needs' children to be literate, numerate and otherwise
appropriately skilled. There is also a related argument about socialization,
often raised in relation to religious schools, which again points to the role education
is assumed to have in preparing people to live in society, in that case, by
making them aware of the shared society and history, teaching respect and
appropriate behaviours, and so on.

Even to
write about these ideas is to court controversy because they are so deeply
embedded in both 'common sense' and bitterly contested arguments. To discuss
them is also to recognise the interconnections of the social and the personal –
we cannot put aside social meanings because they are part of our own meanings
and feelings and the way we make sense of our individual lives, as critical
discursive psychologists would note. For OU academics and students, the issues
are particularly close because of our shared educational project. The OU is its
own social space, a society within a society, with all the pleasure and
possibility of society generally, and the excitement of challenge and conflict.

Some of the content of this blog has
links to our OU module DD317 Advancing
social psychology. You can find more information about the module on OU
websites and you can watch a video
here https://youtu.be/dbzF4hBeBkk

Good criminal, bad criminal?

This week's blog for Advancing social psychology (DD317)
considers the relevance of a key psychological concept, the essential person,
for a recent tv series about the new face of international crime.

A recent BBC drama depicted the takeover of global crime
networks by new 'Harvard-educated', business-focussed criminals. It was about
how the graceless thugs who have previously run profitable markets in drugs and
trafficked sex slaves, are being deposed by smooth, good looking men (they were
all men) in suits. The older generation of criminals were presented as
emotionally volatile and extreme, so finally less effective than their smoother
and more controlled successors.

The series was gripping, although it could of course be
criticised (for example, for the 'us'/ 'them' depictions of particular
nationalities, and also for the representations of women, who mostly accepted
the role of obedient helpmate). My interest here is in how the drama centred on
one of the most enduring ideas bridging psychology and common sense, that of
the essential person.

A simple, seemingly logical idea is that people have an essential
character that they express through their actions. In other words, there is a
causal relationship between the actor and the action – good people do good
things, bad people bad, so a good person can be trusted to behave well, and a
bad person will never be reliable. Most people would consider that account of
the essential person over-simple, but for social psychologists working In a
discursive and narrative tradition, the interest is not in the 'truth' but in how
the idea itself persists and has consequences.

For example, the idea of the essential person underlies the
continual search for evidence, formal and informal. Cvs and other records, appraisals
and psychology tests, and our own 'gut feelings' – all of them are valued for
what they supposedly reveal about a person's essence, because this is assumed
to predict future behaviour. Is this someone to be trusted and to deal with in
the future?

It is also an assumption that carries huge emotional or
affective loading, as can be seen in everyday arguments about motive and
intention, even in trivial situations. Think of the indignation that people
express when they think that their actions have led to their being 'wrongly' understood.
Think of their strong need to explain that what actually happened was not
what they wanted or intended: 'Do you really believe I'm the kind of person who
would do that on purpose?' The causal link has been broken so a convincing
argument must be made to reclaim a positive essential character.

Oddly enough, this defence is often made through reference
to previous good behaviour, returning yet again to the idea of essential
character and attempting to re-establish the causal link that has been broken ('he
gave a lot of money to charity'). Most of us are accustomed to talking about
ourselves and telling the circumstances and events which 'explain' who we are
so we can adapt that narrative account to a particular purpose, such as an
interview for a new job, and we can also invoke it to defend our essential good
character if it seems to be threatened.

We use the idea of the essential person even though,
ironically, we are also very ready to question it. For instance, we probably
accept that appearances can be misleading, that the inner essence can be masked
by a lying exterior. It's easy to believe that a charismatic, apparently honest
politician can turn out to be 'rotten to the core' or, perhaps less frequently,
that someone unprepossessing can be a 'rough diamond' with a 'heart of gold'. However,
we tend to reserve particular indignation for people who do bad things and
confuse the connection between character and behaviour, as with formerly
respected ('good') celebrities who end up discredited or even in jail. Perhaps
this explains the force of the tv series. The new global 'mafia' were shown as
misleading us about their essential characters. They look better than the
old-style criminals but actually carry out even worse crimes because they are more
effective and powerful as a result of their business training.

Many other points could be made about the series. (For
instance, it was definitely exciting, and well-acted. It was well-researched but, at a time when so many legitimate
businesses do not seem to be functioning very well, we could ask if it
overstates the capabilities and threat of those Harvard-educated criminals.)
The focus of this blog has been that, first, it centred on questions which are
central to psychology, including the nature of the person and its connection to
behaviour, and second, how those questions are not only 'academic' but also
part of our everyday sense-making around both fiction and fact.

Social psychology as a social and cultural field

Friday, 26 Jan 2018, 14:40

Visible to anyone in the world

Edited by Stephanie Taylor, Friday, 26 Jan 2018, 14:43

This week's blog
for DD317, Advancing social psychology, introduces
a new academic group in the School of Psychology and explains why its members
see society and culture as central concerns for psychology.

Social psychologists in the School of psychology at the
OU have formed a new group to promote their shared interests. The group is to
be called CUSP which stands for 'Culture and Social Psychology'. Culture and
society might seem surprising foci for psychologists – shouldn't they just be
looking at people? But in the group's view, people are always in society – whether
we think of that as the micro- or local level of being with other people,
perhaps interacting one to one, or, alternatively, as referring to a larger
scale context of more complex interconnections. Social situations vary in scale
and kind, and nowadays, of course, they include virtual interactions, for
instance, on social media.

Society is important for the research of CUSP academics
engaged in some very different projects. For example, they examine society in
terms of groups, and particularly the 'us' vs 'them' groups invoked in
discussions of migration, or sectarian tensions. Their research addresses high
profile social issues, like sexual harassment. And recently they have been studying
Brexit, viewing it as an issue for British society, and the societies of other
member-states of the EU, and also an issue for a European society (though of
course some people would question whether that last version of society actually
exists, while others would claim it as an important context of their
experience).

For CUSP academics, culture generally refers to knowledge
and practices which have developed over time, persist into new situations and
also change. Most people have a fairly clear idea of what constitutes a family,
for example, and the roles of family members, like parents and children – but
what cultural change is involved when, say, children in multilingual families
take on the role of interpreting for their parents? Or when a child's peer
interactions take place on social media so that, suddenly, an enormous audience
of strangers may be influencing their self-image and confidence? What 'culture
of silence' is operating in situations when young people who are 'at risk' can
call for help but somehow go unheard? How are work cultures, and working
lives, changing in the era of the gig economy when 'work' can refer to a job
lasting a few hours, made available through an app, rather than a permanent
contract with an employer? And what is the relationship of knowledge and
practices to the things, or artefacts, associated with a particular culture?

CUSP's interest in culture is therefore not a reference
to art, music and literature (sometimes distinguished as 'high culture')
although those can also be of interest, for example, because of their relevance
to the identities of groups in society. Similarly, cultural artefacts like
books, film and photos can be intimately linked to history and our view of what
happened in the past, remotely and recently. For example, if one picture can
tell a story, as the saying goes, there can be questions about WHAT story is
being promoted by a particularly vivid image (like a child in a war zone), and
who has made the decision that we will see it, and what interests are attached
to our acceptance of that story and not a different version. So culture becomes
linked to power and to values, including who or what is (accepted as) good or
right or important. These are all concerns for CUSP academics.

Things and words: a critical discursive approach to new technologies

In this week's blog,
Stephanie Taylor reviews an interesting new book and presents a view of new technologies
that is informed by critical discursive psychology.

In a season when people are acquiring lots of things, as gifts
and in New Year sales, I have enjoyed reading a new book on 'The Internet of
Things' by Mercedes Bunz and Graham Meikle (Polity, 2018). The authors are
particularly interested in things that have sensors (like the location device
on a smartphone) and can be connected together in networks. The book is
therefore about new technologies, but ones which are becoming increasingly common.

'The Internet of Things' is not a psychological text but it
includes research using Critical Discourse Analysis, an approach which of
course has parallels with discursive and discourse analytic approaches in social
psychology. In addition, the book interested me because it presents some examples
of how people's engagement with the material world is shaped by the kind of
social knowledge that discursive researchers might discuss as 'discourses' or
'repertoires' or 'resources', and also examples of how that knowledge changes

Discursive research is often criticised for just
being about words, that is, for not taking account of the material world, or
bodies, or emotion, or other aspects of our lives and contexts which are
supposedly extra-discursive. The counter-argument is that by analysing words
and language discursive researchers can explore the social knowledge and
meanings which structure our experience, including our engagement with the 'things'
of the material world: 'there is no neat separation between the meanings in
language and in the social world more generally' (Taylor, 2013, p.78). However,
discursive researchers are also interested in other evidence of social
meanings, such as what people do and how they interact. Bunz and Meikle offer a
number of entertaining, and disturbing, examples of how we interact with
technological 'things', and how new interactions are shaped by older meanings.

It seems clear that when approaching wholly new things and
situations, people draw on existing ideas or resources. For instance, when they
(we) receive spoken instructions from a thing, like a car satnav system, they
respond as if they are hearing the voice of a person. In some cases, the satnav
becomes an authority who must be obeyed, like an army officer or an old-style
school teacher. Bunz and Meikle describe situations in which drivers followed
(faulty) satnav instructions to drive hundreds of miles away from their route, or off
the road, up a mountainside, into the side of a house or even the sea. (Why
is it always so cheering to read about technology that goes wrong?)

In other cases, people's social knowledge prompts them to
challenge or resist what the voice is telling them. The voice of a
supermarket's self-scanning checkout device apparently annoyed some customers
so much that they reverted to shoplifting, presumably to get back at the device.
Moreover, the gender of a device voice invokes social prejudices so that a male
voice giving instructions is heard as authoritative but a female voice is
'irritating', unless its messages 'signal a lower status in the relationship
with the speaker' (p.65). In short, we cannot escape our (sexist) social
knowledge, however sophisticated the new technology.

However, 'The Internet of Things' also indicates that social
knowledge changes. New technologies eventually give rise to different meanings
and ways of acting in the world. For example, many people now use health-tracking
devices to monitor their own physical activity and food intake and sleep
patterns. The devices also produce user data which has a commercial value, yet
people seem unworried by the implications for their privacy. The new social
knowledge involved is, first, the way of thinking about ourselves that the
devices promote - in Bunz and Meikle's
words, as 'a competitive individual engaged in a continuous series of struggles
and challenges' (p.103) – and second, the view of self-monitoring and recording,
as 'natural' rather than, say, as intrusive surveillance.

Like everyone else, I will probably step up my
self-monitoring in January as part of a New Year resolution, possibly with the help of a monitoring device. 'The Internet of Things'
is a useful reminder that we are all social beings and nothing, however
technologically sophisticated, is so new that it supersedes its social context.

Some of the content
of this blog has links to our new OU module DD317 Advancing social psychology. You can find more information about
the module on OU websites and you can watch a video here https://youtu.be/dbzF4hBeBkk

The new normal of working lives

Thursday, 23 Nov 2017, 09:06

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In this week's blog, Stephanie Taylor
introduces a new interdisciplinary collection of research The
new normal of working lives: critical studies in contemporary work and
employment,
co-edited by Stephanie Taylor and Susan Luckman for Palgrave Macmillan (2018).
She discusses some of the issues it raises for social psychologists and other
social researchers, concerning a contemporary worker subject.

News about changes to
work tend to focus on technological developments, such as the likely effects of
robotics. But working lives have already changed greatly in recent decades, and
not only because of technology. ‘New work’ is discussed in an academic
collection to be published in January 2018, The
new normal of working lives: critical studies in contemporary work and
employment, edited by myself
and Susan Luckman.

The collection brings
together research conducted by academics from different disciplines, including
cultural and media studies, sociology and psychology. A number of the papers
were originally presented in a conference stream (at the WORK2015 conference http://www.utu.fi/en/units/tcls/sites/work2015/Pages/home.aspx ) entitled ‘Reconceptualising work’. That
topic and the title of the collection indicate some of the key questions
addressed. What changes have occurred in the way we think about work? What
aspects of work that previously might have received more attention have now
come to be taken for granted as normal and unremarkable? Following from that, how
are people changing themselves to manage this ‘new normal’ and become the kind
of worker that's required today?

Although the
collection discusses many kinds of new work, some common themes emerge. Most of
the workers who were studied have high ambitions. They want to do satisfying
and personally meaningful work which pays a good income, and they want to
combine this with a rich personal and family life. The privileged, or lucky,
can arrange their lives to achieve that. However, for the majority of the
workers discussed in the collection, having everything is not attainable,
or at least (as they see it) not yet.

The collection
suggests that whether people today are employed by an organisation or work for
themselves, they operate to a great extent as ‘loners’ rather than as part of a
collective. They accept individual responsibility, for solving problems and meeting deadlines, for
acquiring qualifications and updating their technological skills, and often for
paying for their workplaces and equipment. Some of them have taken over work
that was previously the responsibility of governments and the public sector, such
as the provision of care for the elderly. Some of them are making new jobs out
of activities often regarded as hobbies, like computer gaming or blogging or
vlogging. Many of them bring their personal selves into their work, utilising
their enthusiasms (for instance, for the gaming) or their private experiences
(in the blogging and vlogging).

They also give up
their personal time. They accept very long working days, disciplining themselves
to work more hours with less ‘down time’. They work evenings and weekends, and
in transit between home and work. They are seldom off duty so accept the
breakdown of barriers between work and private life. Many of them use their
homes as their workplaces, especially as a way of managing caring
responsibilities.

All of this inevitably
creates problems. Many of the workers don’t earn much, especially for the
effort and the long hours they put in. Yet they apparently accept the
difficulties as necessary. In the most extreme situations they manage by hoping
for better lives in the future, even when there seems little reason to expect improvement,
and sometimes when their current actions (for instance, incurring debts while
working unpaid) will almost certainly create extra problems in the future.

Taken together, the
collection therefore presents a picture of difficulties but also optimism, of dedication
but also great expectations. It suggests that contemporary workers discipline
themselves to be extremely hardworking and tolerant of difficulties, to
prioritise their jobs over their private lives, to accept disappointment and
limited rewards but also remain ambitious and optimistic. Is this a sustainable
ideal, or even one that can be achieved? Whose interests does it serve? What is
required to make yourself into this new worker? And is this the kind of person
we should be aspiring to become?

Addressing the surprising absence of class: Interdisciplinary research on careers

Sunday, 5 Nov 2017, 11:57

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The starting point for
a research project is often a gap – or more specifically, the recognition that an
important topic has not been addressed by previous researchers. In this week's
blog, Samantha Evans discusses the surprising absence of class in some psychology
research, and how she is addressing this in an interdisciplinary project on
classed inequalities in work and careers.

I
became interested in social class when I was exploring women’s career
development for my MSc. I was actually researching age and gender, but for over
half the participants, class was one of the most salient features of their stories,
explaining where they started in life, justifying how far they had come and who
they were now. What was equally interesting was how, for the other half of participants,
class was completely absent from their accounts.

Further
investigation has suggested that social class is also absent in the
organisational psychology literature - the
branch of social psychology that I had chosen to
specialise in. Academics propose many reasons for this – that class is difficult
to define; that it may be overlooked in favour of legally protected
characteristics such as race or gender, or perhaps is seen as irrelevant and
invisible in an increasingly “individualised” workplace. Overall it is a
surprising absence, particularly given that social class has a high profile in
other disciplines such as sociology, where it is often defined in relation to
people’s work and careers.

As my thinking developed, it
became clear to me that class was a matter of understanding not only how the individual
is classed, but also the wider context they are in. Thus I decided to explore one
particular occupation in-depth to understand how ideas of “getting in” and “getting
on” are talked about, and what this then means for people from different social
backgrounds. I have chosen to look at museums, partly because I used to work in
this field (and this helps with data access), partly because museums are
struggling to be more “open to all” and partly because as gatekeepers of our
own collective culture, it is arguably important that they do share that role
equally.

In the spirit of
interdisciplinary research, I am drawing on the writing of Pierre Bourdieu, a
sociologist, whose work I believe has a great potential value to organisational
psychologists. His theory provides a particular way of looking at the
“individual-social interface”, arguing that whilst people are constrained by
the “rules” of the particular social contexts (or fields) in which they are
positioned (e.g. the field of museums or higher education), they have some
flexibility in how to “play the game” depending on their experiences and
dispositions. Succeeding in “the game” depends on the capital (economic, social
or cultural) that is valued by the field, and the amount and type of this
capital that individuals possess. Thus in the museum field for example, having
a certain type of cultural capital such as knowledge of art or a PhD, may be
valued more highly than PR or marketing know-how, and this in itself is more
accessible and attractive to some groups of people rather than others.

Indeed, key to Bourdieu’s theory
is the view that “the game” is not objective and natural (as it can seem), but
has been socially constructed and privileges some groups and not others. The
aim of the researcher is to explore how the field has been constructed, what
types of capital are valued and how people from different social backgrounds
make sense of this. I am employing critical discourse analysis to do this, using
interviews, focus groups, and existing texts. I have phased my data collection,
looking firstly at the overall field, and secondly exploring people’s careers
at an individual level. I am just embarking on a detailed analysis of the data
collected for phase one, so themes and findings are emergent, though initial
impressions suggest class is talked about in a number of contradictory ways,
whilst “getting in and on” is talked
about mostly as an individual enterprise, both of which tend to obscure the
problem of, and solution to, classed inequality. Phase two will explore this in
more detail.

The aim is that this approach offers
a different way of understanding and addressing classed inequality at work.
Thus rather than simply increasing the representation of people from different
backgrounds, and hoping for the best, this research will highlight how more
structural and cultural features of context need to be addressed (as well as
the possible issues of doing so). This could be used to explore other forms of
inequality at work and other occupational fields. It is also a potentially useful
way to understand your own self at work (perhaps as a social psychologist too!),
thinking of the capital that is valued in your chosen field and finding ways to
maximise what you have.

Samantha Evans is an
Associate Lecturer on DD317 Advancing
social psychology. To learn more about the module, you can watch a
video here https://youtu.be/dbzF4hBeBkk

Research on citizenship and political action: Building a new project

Wednesday, 18 Oct 2017, 13:33

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Research topics are attempts to bridge gaps between academia and
everyday life, and between theory and action. For Spyridon Logothetis, research is an attempt
to bring contemporary contexts into academia and to make our discipline more
relevant to our everyday lives. In this blog, he describes how he formulated
his interdisciplinary social psychological PhD project on local political action
in Greece.

As an undergraduate I
always thought that psychology was about individuals, individuals who may be
racist, prejudiced, authoritarian and so on. However, by isolating the individual
from their social context, I felt that we were missing a large part of the
story. In other words, I felt that we chose to discuss social problems only as an
extension of problematic individuals. In my opinion, this positioned psychology
as a discipline outside the world which it is very much a part of.

Because I was concerned
with social issues, I started exploring social
psychology in an attempt to address the problems as part of a system rather
than as the products of individuals. As I kept reading, I realized that my
understanding of the everyday world was also changing. Now, any news about social and political
issues was both an opportunity and a
problem: an opportunity to bring a contemporary issue into academia, and a
social problem that required a solution through participation in collective
action.

When I
started to formulate my research project, I asked myself ‘What is interesting here? Why is it interesting
for me? Why is it interesting for psychology? How can I address the issue?”. Given
my academic background, and because I have been involved in collective action and
I come from Greece, a country where politics is never boring, I thought that the
best way to combine my everyday life and my academic interests would be by trying
to challenge established notions and to situate my research in an everyday contemporary
context.

As such, my PhD project will study citizenship from the perspectives of lay political actors, through
an examination of local political action
in Greece. Recently, in the context of the refugee crisis and the economic
crisis, there has been a resurgence in collective action that aims to
appropriate space as a means of protest and as a means to make claims visible
in the public sphere. Such claims connect with a strand of research that
suggests that certain actions, like protesting, occupying space and so on, are
a way of performing citizenship.

Contrary to so much social science research that focuses on
policies and institutions, or constructs citizenship as belonging to a nation
state, my aim with this project is to develop an everyday approach to citizenship, paying particular attention to the role of place for identities and
drawing insights from social psychology, geography, anthropology and political
science. As you will notice, my project is not restricted to social psychology
because I think that many of the answers we seek are not adequately addressed
by disciplines in isolation. We should bridge gaps by drawing insights from other disciplines. For
example, my project has a specific focus on space and identity, a concept with
a long-standing tradition in social geography.

The project will take place in Exarcheia, a neighborhood in Athens.
I chose this specific area as it has a tradition of collective action, as well
as a strong focus on reclaiming space as both a means of protest and a means of
addressing social problems such as inadequate housing. The project is an
attempt to examine contemporary issues
through a socio-psychological lens. It is also an attempt to situate my
research in a way that I can relate to personally and academically. For me,
working on something I am genuinely interested in makes a lot of things easier.

The next part of structuring
a research project involves choosing your methods.
The social sciences have a range of different methods, both quantitative and
qualitative. The important question is ‘What
do I want to know?’. This question guided my choice. Both quantitative and
qualitative methods have their merits as well as their limitations. For
example, a questionnaire can cover a range of topics and it can be easily
distributed, but it provides only superficial information, reduced to a 1-7
point scale. On the other hand, semi-structured interviews provide in-depth
scrutiny of the topic, but they are also time-consuming and limit the project
to a small sample size.

My aim was to choose an appropriate tool, keeping in mind time
constraints, the need to obtain access to participants, ethical issues and
other problems. I decided that I will use semi-structured interviews, walking interviews,
photo documentation and field notes. In
this particular project, an in-depth examination of people’s rhetorical
constructions, supplemented with photographic material, offers a more holistic
approach and provides a rich context so that a reader can relate to and
understand things in the context they
occur.

To sum up, I see the process
of structuring a project as similar to building a house. Just as the house
requires materials, a worker’s skills and labour, tools etc., the project requires
a broad knowledge of the topic and the context in which the research is going
to take place, the researcher’s effort, and a methodological toolkit appropriate
for the job. Most importantly, it requires dedication, organization and
consistent application. However, the outcome is always rewarding and will
become a concrete step up to further accomplishments.

New social psychology research on a contemporary subject

Friday, 6 Oct 2017, 16:34

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This week's blog reviews a recent success
for a newly qualified social psychologist, Dr Marie Paludan. Her work is an
interesting example of current interdisciplinary research which has 'real life'
significance, and also links to some of the content in our new module Advancing social psychology (DD317).

This week a research
student from our OU School of Psychology, Marie Paludan, received the AOUG Chancellor
Baroness Boothroyd Award for Citizenship, Identities and Governance, given for a PhD
on 'Performing young womanhood in neoliberal Britain: Discursive constructions
of new femininities'. To unpack all of that, AOUG is the Association of Open
University Graduates (AOUG) and they give a number of awards each year to students who
were OU undergraduates, then went on to do PhDs. This award is named after a
former Chancellor of the OU, Baroness Boothroyd. I thought it was particularly
appropriate that it was the award received by Dr Paludan, because Baroness
Boothroyd was the OU's first woman Chancellor and Marie's PhD is about women,
specifically young women in England, as the title indicates.

The starting
point for Marie's research was the large amount of media attention given to
contemporary young women, depicting them on the one hand as 'empowered' (the
successful beneficiaries of feminism!) and on the other, as having many
problems (e.g. prone to eating disorders, under pressure to look good and be
'sexy', and to be high achievers but not too clever because that puts
people off, and to have careers but also make sure they settle down and have
children before they get too old – you can probably think of a few more....).
Marie wanted to find out how young women confront and manage these ideas about
who they are and should be, while living their lives as contemporary young
women. This is an interest shared by a number of contemporary academics in
different disciplines so there is a fair amount of related research, but none that has exactly the same focus. Marie approached it as a social
psychological problem, and more specifically, one in critical discursive psychology.
This gave her a particular way of understanding people, and gender.

As one of
her PhD supervisors, I found the research especially interesting because of her
research data and methodology. Her chosen approach was discourse analysis,
which in psychology is associated with audio data (usually audio-recorded
interviews). However, Marie developed the approach further in order to analyse
video, specifically vlogs (video logs). If you don't already know about these
(I didn't – but I'm quite old), they're the YouTube videos which have made some
young people into celebrities, talking about their lives, their tips for make
up and so on, all through videos recorded in their bedrooms. In this case, the
vlogs were made by young women for an audience of other young women, presenting
'how to' advice on how to manage yourself and your problems (in a way which
somehow made the vlogger look as if she didn't have any problems herself).

So this is a
good example of contemporary social psychology research. It began with an issue
in society today and looked at other relevant research. It framed the issue as
a social psychological problem and adopted an established social psychological
approach and method. But it then developed the method further in order to work
with a different form of data that was particularly relevant to the issue being
studied. If you want to know about Marie's findings, you can obtain the thesis
through the OU library. Meanwhile, other students are studying related issues
on our new module Advancing social
psychology (DD317): new femininities, and masculinities; feminism and
post-feminism, critical psychological research, and discourse analysis.

Changing people by changing ideas?

In this week's blog,
Stephanie Taylor considers links between some DD317 themes and a recent news
story.

A news story has prompted me to reflect on processes that
produce change, an issue relevant to our new module Advancing social psychology (DD317) https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/sep/15/posh-bbc-removes-qualifications-from-cvs-of-job-applicants.
The BBC is concerned that its workforce does not sufficiently reflect and
represent the class composition of UK society. The organisation has therefore
decided to edit the CVs of its job applicants in order to remove details of their
schools and universities. The aim is to promote the appointment of candidates
from a wider range of social backgrounds in order to make the BBC staff more
socioeconomically diverse. (Apparently the proportions of BBC employees who attended
private schools, have parents with university degrees or have parents in
high-level occupations are all higher than the national average.)

Of course this raises many questions. Is educational
background a marker of class? Do elite schools and universities change the
class of the people who attend them, or do they accept most of their intake
from people who are already privileged? And is this the privilege of
having more money, or some other class advantage (for example, based on where
people live and their parents' occupations)? Is the BBC's action unfair to
people, including some from working class backgrounds, who have worked extra
hard to attend elite universities (or send their children to elite schools)
precisely to gain some advantage? And do the supposedly elite universities
actually provide a better education, or is the HE experience all about the student's
own engagement and efforts to learn? For now, I'll put most of those questions
aside, although class is a fascinating topic in itself, especially in the UK.
What I want to discuss here is the proposed action itself and why it might (or
might not) produce change.

The rationale for the BBC's action seems clear. The CV details
are assumed to bias recruiters in favour of candidates who have educational backgrounds
similar to their own, perpetuating the differences which already exist between
the BBC workforce and the wider UK society. But why would this happen? What processes
operate to produce such a bias? Like other large organisations, the BBC will
certainly have an Equal Opportunities policy and the people who sit on its
recruitment panels will be aware that they should be fair and unprejudiced. Presumably
most of them embrace these principles and have tried to behave accordingly. Yet
the BBC has found that it cannot solve its diversity problem by inviting
individual recruiters and panels to pay conscious attention to their choices
and decision-making.

One social explanation for the failure is that the recruiters
are exhibiting an 'unconscious bias' towards and/or against particular
candidates. Psychoanalytic social psychologists (see Block 5 of DD317) might
explain this bias in terms of 'the irrational, dynamic force of an unconscious
realm, constituting an unknown and
directly unknowable intention within
the human self' (Kaposi, p.131). In other words, the BBC recruiters may be
driven to act unfairly, whatever their good principles and intentions, and
without recognising what they are doing.

More generally, social psychologists might consider the bias
in terms of a division between 'us' and 'them'. It demonstrates, if you like, a
prejudice in favour of the familiar, against 'the other'. We may not intend to
favour people who are similar to ourselves, yet we do so because we see them as
normal while viewing different people negatively, or even failing to notice
them at all. For example, the recruitment panels may not even recognise different
applicants as potential BBC recruits, without realising that this 'othering'
process is occurring.

Social psychologists who work in a discursive tradition might
look here at the ideas and images which are dominant in society. Who do we
associate with particular roles, like news reporter or tv presenter? There is
quite a range of people already working in these jobs but you can probably
identify some categories who don't seem to 'fit'. (Hint: think age, accent,
disability, level of education, style of dress, and also your general idea of
who is, and isn't, attractive.) If recruiters look for a candidate who 'seems
right', they are likely to appoint someone who corresponds to the dominant image,
with the consequence that the workforce overall does not change. There may be an additional pressure or tendency towards more conventional, even outdated selections
because the dominant image is somewhat caricatured or clichéd. For example, a
recent appeal for amateur radio presenters found that many of the applicants
were trying to sound like broadcasters of the past rather than the present. (In
that case, the judging panel rejected them for being too old-fashioned!)

How, then, can we escape the circularity of like recruiting
like? What action can be taken to challenge privilege and promote change? One answer is to
work at the social and cultural level to alter currently dominant ideas and
images. This may seem particularly appropriate for the BBC. On the one hand, it
supposedly represents our society in all its diversity (as the British Broadcasting
Corporation). On the other, it is an important contributor to the culture of
that society through its programmes and associated activities. By putting 'different'
people in visible roles it can break down 'us' and 'them' divisions, reducing
the gap between the dominant images and the reality of British society today.
And yet... Despite its special opportunities to influence what we think of as
'normal', the BBC has apparently not managed to produce change within its own
current workforce, or at least the ones who do the recruiting. What has been
the obstacle? Why have they continued to 'other' most of their fellow Britons?
The proposed new measures will almost certainly be criticised as 'red tape' and
bureaucracy, but it will be interesting to see if they produce changes that
this important cultural industry could not achieve in other ways.

Reference

Dávid Kaposi (2017) 'Understanding conflict and violence: a
psychoanalytic approach to social psychology' in E.Andreouli and S.Taylor (eds)
Advancing social psychology Milton
Keynes: The Open University.

Social psychology at the Open University

Tuesday, 12 Sep 2017, 14:29

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The Open
University has a long history of innovative work in social psychology,
including through its Level 3 social psychology modules. Many of the textbooks
from earlier modules have become teaching 'classics', used in universities
worldwide. We've called our newest module, DD317, Advancing social psychology because we want to convey the dynamic
nature of the discipline, moving into new areas of theory and research, often
informed by contributions from other disciplines.

This new
module, DD317, is the teaching 'voice' of the large social psychology research
group in the OU's School of Psychology. It includes the research of the academics
who produced the module – Eleni Andreouli, David Kaposi, Rachel Manning, Paul
Stenner and Stephanie Taylor – and also contributions from other social
psychologists in the School - Rose Capdevila, Johanna Motzkau, and our Emeritus
Professors, Wendy Hollway and Margaret Wetherell. You can look us up on the
School of Psychology website http://fass.open.ac.uk/psychology
. In addition, of course, the module presents theory and research from academics
in many other universities in the UK and elsewhere.

As we move
into DD317's first presentation, we'll continue this blog to update you on new
developments in social psychology at the OU, including the publications and
research activities of the module team and our colleagues. So keep checking the
blog. And for all of you who have registered for the new module, good luck and
enjoy your studies!

Here we go....new beginnings, and their social meanings

Tuesday, 5 Sep 2017, 09:39

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As we reach September, the DD317 module team
reflect on autumn, the new academic year and – at last – the launch of our
module.

We began this DD317 blog
in spring, a time of new beginnings. Now it’s September and nearly autumn,
simultaneously an end time, for the summer, and also another beginning, for the
new academic year. This is an example of how ‘facts’ (e.g. about the time of
year) depend on the social context. Workers in some parts of society, like
hospitality industries, are probably starting to relax, anticipating a quieter
time for a few months, whereas academics, like the DD317 module team, are
taking a deep breath, opening their new diaries and looking forward to work. We
are very pleased to be starting the module.

Social researchers explore
the meanings of situations, events and people. There are many traditional ideas
and images attached to autumn, from the benign (harvest fruit, changing leaves)
to the slightly depressing (falling temperatures and lengthening nights). In
addition, of course we now live in an advertising year which from here on moves
us through Halloween, Christmas and New Year, Valentine’s Day, Easter and
summer holidays: you can probably think of a few more marker points to add in. Narrative
and discursive social psychologists might discuss this as the dominant
narrative of the contemporary year. Its trajectory can be drawn as a line of peaks
and falls, each associated with encouragements to do certain things:
dress up, celebrate and indulge in rich food, or diet and get fit; spend money
or economize; go out or stay home; socialize or be solitary.

Why does this matter? It
seems trivial but has wider implications. On one scale, the encouragements are
linked to commercial ventures, for instance, to sell us chocolate and gym
memberships. If too few of us buy winter clothes or summer holidays, then
businesses will be threatened. So there are economic interests in our compliance
with seasonally appropriate behaviour, and power struggles around the
associations of the year (think of the increased media focus on Black Friday as
a day in the US shopping year which is perhaps being imported to the UK).

On the personal and
individual level that interests psychologists, we are influenced by the social
year and our social context in ways that go beyond simple ‘choices’. We will
find it difficult, if not impossible, to separate ourselves from the events and
activities of this social year. We probably shape our own lives to it, organising
ourselves to act in seasonally appropriate ways, for instance, to be convivial
at New Year and active during the summer. In addition, we experience the
trajectory of the social year emotionally, including through feelings of
failure at non-compliance (such as the well-known patterns of holiday and
festive season depression). We also experience conflict on an individual level,
for example, when at particular points in the year (holidays, Christmas)
spending money we can't afford can seem to be simultaneously the right and
wrong thing to do.

In short, we are
social beings and social subjects, disciplining or governing ourselves to
comply with social norms and also being shaped by society in our most personal
experiences. Yet we are not the same. Each of us is distinctive and able (we
feel) to make choices. Society is complex precisely because people do not all
obediently walk in step, doing the same things at the same time. This is the
paradox of social psychology and one of its most interesting debates. In DD317,
we call it the ‘social-individual interface'. We explore its manifestations and
implications around a wide range of issues.

Pride, social psychology and the contested politics of identity

Thursday, 3 Aug 2017, 16:41

Visible to anyone in the world

This week's blog for Advancing social psychology, DD317, by
Eleni Andreouli, discusses the politics of Pride and some of the questions that
social psychologists bring to LGBTQ issues and contested identities.

Since June, hundreds of Pride events have been taking place across
the UK (see
Stonewall’s website for information). These events commemorate the
Stonewall riots of 1969 in New York City, which were incited by a police raid
of Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village, and which until
today serve as a symbol in the LGBTQ rights movement. This year, Pride also
coincides with the 50-year anniversary of the decriminalisation of
homosexuality in Britain.

Pride is a celebration of difference, as is evidenced in the
party atmosphere and the colourful rainbow flags of these events. More
importantly, Pride is a loud call for social recognition. It makes otherwise
minoritized identities (gay, trans, bi etc.) visible and present. The parades
in central public spaces and streets (such as London’s Oxford Street) are an
example of this increased, albeit brief, visibility.

The politics of Pride are, however, more complicated than
what a simple minority/majority schema suggests. While Pride has gone a long
way to bring LGBTQ issues to the mainstream, critics argue that it promotes a
narrow vision of liberal tolerance and that it commercialises and, ultimately,
de-politicises struggles for recognition and equality.

Pride is clearly an example of the contested politics of
identity; a politics, that is, of making rights claims on the basis of a shared
identity which has been historically oppressed. Identity is of course a central
social psychological concept and many social psychologists have studied how
identities become the source for political action. Social psychologists have
also alerted us to the danger of essentialising identities, that is,
approaching identities as fixed, singular and mutually exclusive. Taking what
is called an ‘intersectionality’ approach, social psychologists have studied
not only how groups act on the basis of a shared identity, but also how
identities mutually constitute each other to produce complex subjectivities and
intermingling communities.